What is eugenics? / by Leonard Darwin.

  • Leonard Darwin
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: What is eugenics? / by Leonard Darwin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/100 (page 14)
    14 WHAT IS EUGENICS? Thus, when studying the effect of surroundings we are not studying eugenics. But such studies, as we shall see, have important indirect bearings on our subject. When groups of men have free dealings or intercourse with each other, this we may describe as social contact. Now social contact is never a one-sided affair. When a group, which is morally or mentally superior in any way, comes in contact with an inferior group, that inferior group will be benefited by that contact. The superior group generally realizes this quite sufficiently. But it is equally certain that the inferior group tends to drag down the superior, and this is a fact which is often over¬ looked. Social contact, no doubt, tends very slowly to bring all the groups affected to a common level or condition. And that level will be above the bottom and below the top. Social contact always has a levelling effect. Now, persons living in poor homes cannot have the same opportunities of improving their minds as have the well-to-do. As a rule, the children of the day labourer, for example, must be at some disadvantage as compared with the children of the skilled artizan. No doubt all that is practicable should be done to put the different classes on an equality as regards such opportunities; provided that the results would be on the whole beneficial and not demoralizing. But reforms of this kind often do good but very slowly; and we may ask whether some other methods of improving the lot of all classes cannot be simultaneously set in operation. Families appearing in poor homes are at the present time larger than those found amongst the better paid classes. As compared with the parent generation, the children born in better-equipped homes are, therefore, outnumbered by those coming from worse surroundings. The result of social contact between the classes must in consequence now be a downward drag on the nation as a whole in regard to all qualities thus affected. Ought we not to try to reverse this state of things ? If the well- to-do had the big families and the poor the small ones,